The strange modern pursuit of the natural world and its pleasures is for Percy a smokescreen to hide evidence of a panicked retreat from the supernatural. The Cartesian world is always trying to guard the natural against the incursions of the supernatural. It would seem the worst possible nightmare for the modernist would be a world in which natural objects have “superstitious” power. The paradox of the modern is that the natural world becomes degraded in the process of protecting it from the spiritual world. Percy, as a Catholic, saw evidence of the spiritual in very common objects: in bread and wine and sex and wooden crosses and words spoken by man.
The prospect of authority residing in a physical-metaphysical institution like the Church has always driven the modernist mad. But for Percy this is the inevitable end—the denouement at which the entire plot of the Western world is about to arrive. The mere existence of truth or meaning is useless if it cannot be spoken or transmitted by someone with authority. The message “is not enough.” There must be “someone who delivers the news and who speaks with authority.”
Of course, the typical American Protestant, among other sons of the Enlightenment, rebels at the thought of an ecclesial institution which claims authority over both body and soul. In Love in the Ruins, More’s wife embodies this mindset:
What bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up with religion. The black sweater and the ashes scandalize her.... What have these things, articles, to do with doing right? For she mistrusts the Old church's traffic in things, sacraments, articles, bread, wine, salt, oil, water, ashes. Watch out! You know what happened before when you Catholics mucked it up with all your things, medals, scapulars, candles, bloody statues!
More on the other hand instinctively falls back on these ordinary “things” when he reaches his turning point late in the novel. The lovely ordinary world which the modern myth had destroyed, Percy has hopes of restoring. The vehicle of this restoration is, simply, the Church. The community of the body of Christ promises to restore meaning, love, fellowship, and a connection to the eternal while still time-bound.
Modernism has spawned both the hard realists and the romantic idealists. Each movement shares the common impulse to locate meaning and community somewhere other than in ordinary things. As Crowley argues, both the realist and the idealist “infer a ‘flight’ or disassociation from the incarnate real—flesh and Spirit—a flight from real presence as grounded in the Incarnation of God-in-Christ.” Percy, of course, puts the Incarnate at the center of his world.
The implication of this is vital. If the Real can infuse the ordinary things of the world, and if the Real is authoritative, then the ordinary things of this world can hold authority over us. More practically, the “sacraments, articles, bread, wine, salt, oil, water, ashes” of the Old religion do have power. While the modernist would like to place the seat of authority in the individual conscience, the Old religion places it in things. This is the highest blasphemy to the dying modern world, and the one thing which the modernists believed to have been vanquished centuries before.
The sense of “cosmic sexual-religious longing” which Percy the physician diagnoses in the modern world will find its fulfillment only in the Church. The “thread in the labyrinth” which is all that connects the West with its religious heritage is the Church. Much like the Chesterton’s “twitch upon the thread,” Percy ultimately is no pessimist about the future of the West. As long as the Church remains, there is hope for a restored community, something Percy hinted at in Love in the Ruins: “at the end … there is a suggestion of a new community, new reconciliation. It has been called a pessimistic novel but I do not think it is. A renewed community is suggested. The suggestion is in the last scene which takes place in a midnight mass between Christmas Saturday and Sunday.”
In the end, the one thing which can save modern man is the thing most abhorrent to him. At the end of his novel, The Moviegoer, Percy’s modern protagonist muses: “Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.” Once the modern world is stripped of every last pretense of desire, community, and authority, it will be left with nothing to shield itself from the haunting presence of the Divine. Modernism, according to Percy, has unwittingly set itself up to be vulnerable to the very message of the Church which it once attacked so violently:
But what if a man receives the commission to bring news across the seas to the castaway and does so in perfect sobriety and with good faith and perseverance to the point of martyrdom? And what if the news the newsbearer bears is the very news the castaway had been waiting for, news of where he came from and who he is and what he must do, and what if the newsbearer brought with him the means by which the castaway may do what he must do? Well then, the castaway will, by the grace of God believe him.
And for Percy, the signs of this restoration between God and man are already around us. The modernist may have thought his four hundred year-old tradition had saved him from God and His Church. But God likes to have his revenge. He is onto us.
